Glennalicious

Amen! Preach it Miss Mathematics! (I'm nasty)

I hear the same thing when I tell people I'm a chemist. "Oh, I hated chemistry." I always want to reply, "Really? Enjoying that beer you're drinking? Well, thank a chemist you twit."

I'll bet even morticians don't hear, "Oh, you're a mortician? I hate death."

i was wondering if you might take an entire post and wax poetically on the differences in Arithmetic and Mathmatics. are they similar to 'Olde Englifh' and modern 'English'? i thought so....

I can so relate to what you're saying! My experience differs slightly though. It usually goes like this:

"Oh! You're a kindergarten teacher? I HATE kids."

This is then followed by a treatise on how spoiled, ill-mannered and horrible little kids are to be around.

I find myself either defending my choice of profession and/or small humans in general.

People seem to reserve these kinds of remarks especially for teachers.... :)

HAHAHAHAHA!!!!!
i can count to 100!!!!
and i thought i was mathiliterate.
i met a woman who has taught math for 30 years and when i told her my math issues (because, as you have pointed out, we all feel no shame in "sharing" with random math teachers)
she told me that i was ptobably better at math than a lot of people because i approached it as a concept rather than a hard science.
she MAY have been trying to make me feel better because she KNOWS im a mathtard.

Ok, I *can* do simple math, but for some reason I seem to do much better with word languages than with symbol languages, or at least number ones. Math is a perpetually and exceedingly foreign language to me. Even more foreign than Spanish, which I've never studied (unlike math), but which I tried to use today to communicate with one of our many Spanish-speaking parents. Thanks to La Nueva Escuelita, at least I knew the word for school. ;-)

Oh don't you worry Mister G. I DO have fingers, and I DO use them. Whenever no one's looking.

I guess it's similar to being a language teacher and constantly hearing "Oh, I took X years of X language in high school and I can't speak a word of it." I've never been sure exactly what such a confession is supposed to imply, but it usually seems intended not as a statement of personal inadequacy but as an indictment of the profession, or even the whole concept, of language teaching. I'm always tempted to respond something like, "It's such a shame you weren't a better student."

We in the Third World say "Maths"...

I wish my Mathematics teachers had been as hot as you...

Well, English teachers always seem to get "Oh, I hated English." And "I can't do grammar" is never far behind. And to say I enjoy the concept of teaching high school is always to ask for some variant of "You must like punishment."

I think it is a teacher thing, not so much a subject-specific thing.

The only reason I hate math is I had horrible teachers. One really awful teacher, to be precise. She scarred a lot of us and made us feel utterly unable to do math. She also made it tedious and boring, and emphasized that everyone would think we were stupid if we couldn't do long division. I was GREAT at math until I had that teacher... and then... pffft.

So, uh, don't be like that.

I like Math. Geometry is my foe!

As easy as 1-2-3!

Cheers,
Mr. H.K.
Postcards from Hell's
Kitchen
And I Quote Blog

And I love it when other intelligent literacy teachers tell me (the math teacher) that they don't know math, with a smile, as if they are proud. Unfortunately, I can't blame them for having this attitude, for it goes back to how we were taught math. As students of mathematics, were never taught to enjoy, value, ponder or simply understand the beauty of this language. My memories of learning math are blurry from all those memorization of algorithms, while my memories of ways of appreciating of literature are definitely different... Change starts in your class!